July recap

Vive le Tour 🇫🇷

After 26 days on the road, 927 kilometres cycled and 14,357 metres climbed, we're back in the UK - tired, buzzing, and sporting some very questionable tan lines.

We followed the men’s Tour de France, spotting the top riders, collecting lots of freebies, and attempting some of the legendary climbs ourselves. Across July, we rode through Normandy, Brittany, the Loire Valley, Languedoc, Provence, the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Jura.

I've never cycled this much in my life, and really, really enjoyed it - despite the sore thighs. New life achievement: the 26km long Col de la Loze that goes up to 2300m elevation. The views were just WOW.

Now I’m back, catching up on work and curious to see how my scheduled content performed while I was away.

As always in these monthly recaps, here are three reflections - this time on work-life balance, content planning and rest.

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Reflection 1: Take time when the opportunity arises

In theory, you get unlimited holidays as a freelancer, but whether you take them is a different matter. For the past 2.5 years I haven't taken a holiday without my laptop longer than a week.

What normally holds me back is being in the hamster wheel of work, a fear of things breaking and also my partner's holiday allowance (given he works full time).

So, when he had a 4-week gap, we took the opportunity.

I’d planned to work for part of it. But once I stepped back, it was clear: this opportunity doesn’t come round often. So, I prepped five newsletters, twenty LinkedIn posts and scheduled them all the week before we left.

Despite the preparation I had a fear that things would break.

And guess what?

Nothing broke. Woohoo!

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Reflection 2: Scheduled content works better than you think

I set up 4 weeks’ worth of posts across LinkedIn and the newsletter before I left - not expecting much from them. But some performed surprisingly well.

Email performed best:

Thanks to you, readers, I've hit record open rates while I was away:

• ​The complete guide to test methods hit a 65% open rate after 7 days - a new record, as normally open rates rise slowly over time (what did you like about this one?)
• ​What Typeform gets right (and Mailchimp misses) reached a 66% open rate - the best since January

LinkedIn was more mixed

​One carousel did really well with 4k impressions, 50 likes and a share. The rest of the posts were more like ~1000 impressions and a handful of likes.

There’s a theory that LinkedIn penalises in-app scheduled posts. That might be true - but individual performance wasn’t really the goal.

My idea was to keep things warm for when I'm back, so I'm not starting from zero.

To that goal, I did well. 33k impressions over the past 28 days and 4% increase in followers. Not bad for scheduled content. I also had my assistant Becca to reply to comments while I was gone, which helped massively.

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Reflection 3: Give yourself time to get back into gear

Everyone’s different, but I’ve learned I need a buffer after a big trip - a bit of a gap between holiday mode and work mode.

We got back last Tuesday, and I gave myself five days at home before diving back in. In this time, I've:

🧺 Done the washing
🎁 Sent gifts
📬 Wrote this newsletter
📓 Started clearing my inbox (slowly)
🐶 Spent quality time with the dog

Not everyone needs this, but if I don't take time to re-centre and ground myself, I'm a chaos demon and no one wants to see that.

I’ve realised how much better this time makes me: I’m sharper, more motivated, and far less irritable.

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So, what's coming up in August?

We have some exciting new newsletters in the next month (including Climbfinder as I used it so much when I was away and I know how much you like the obscure dives), a big announcement on Monday, moving to substack and (potentially) my first ever sponsor!

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Finally, my favourite decoration of the Tour:

Shoutout to this funeral home who had a rather dark way to celebrate 👇

See you next week,

Rosie 🕺

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